"Build together, learn together". Students design a building for refugees

Build Together – Learn Together is a participatory building in Mannheim. 18 students of the Faculty of Architecture at TU Kaiserslautern built a community centre together with 25 refugees. The refugees were given the opportunity to actively shape their environment and acquire new skills, which will be useful, even if they cannot stay in Germany on a permanent basis. The students were able to make an active and positive contribution to the refugee crisis. As future architects they contribute expertise that may appear luxurious in a refugee camp at first glance, but is even more important upon closer inspection: the creation of pleasant places and high-quality architecture. After pinning down the outlines together with the refugees, the students developed design, permission and execution drawings as well as visualizations and cost planning in the course of a very intensive summer semester.

All structural elements and surfaces are made of untreated timber. For protection from moisture during the construction process and in order to manufacture these parts in only six weeks, large-format components were prefabricated in a hangar of the former military facility and assembled on site with high speed and precision. The light weight of timber allowed for the transport of large elements by simple means and simultaneously reduced foundations to few singular footing foundations by incorporating the walls as trusses. In this way, both the costs for foundations and the negative ecological impact of concrete were reduced to a minimum.

In order to make the best use of many helping hands and to reduce building costs, no large machinery was employed. Instead, simple and material-saving but labour-intensive constructions were used. Walls and trusses made of simple battens 3 by 5 cm are symbolic representants of this method: Screwed together to a grid of five vertically and diagonally arranged layers, they build a highly efficient supporting structure for walls and trusses. The ornamental structure results in the building‘s unique architectural expression. Multiplied by the interplay with light, it is recognized by the refugees as a reminder of oriental ornaments and as an inviting gesture of identification in a foreign place.